Facebook Opens Messenger for App Developers

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook changed how 1.4 billion people share their baby photos, major life events and goofy cat videos with friends. Now it wants to change their one-on-one conversations, too.

Just as Facebook turned its social network into a bigger platform for games and group conversations, the company wants to make its instant-messaging service, now 600 million users strong, into a similar system for communications of all kinds.

On Wednesday, Facebook told app makers at its annual developer conference that it was opening up access to its Messenger app, allowing developers to piggyback their own apps on top of Facebook chats. The company showed off nearly 50 apps for Messenger that were created under the program, including one that turns text messages into songs and another that allows a user to search for and send an animated GIF to express a mood.

“Until now, we have focused on improving Messenger by building all of these features ourselves,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, told developers.

By opening the platform, he said, Facebook wants to tap the creativity of other app makers. “We’re really excited about what you all are able to do with these fast and simple tools we are rolling out,” he said.

But Facebook’s ambitions for messaging don’t stop there. Last week, the company added a payment button to Messenger that allows users to send money instantly to their friends, and most analysts expect the company to eventually expand it to purchases from businesses.

At the developer conference, Facebook said it would soon begin testing a system to allow businesses to use Messenger to offer personalized service to customers after a purchase is made. For example, a person might be able to use Messenger to change the color of a shirt in an order or see where a package is in the UPS delivery system.

Facebook’s initial partners are the clothing retailers Zulily and Everlane, but the company also hopes to lure other types of businesses, such as airlines and cable companies, that frequently face customer service issues.

“We all have to agree that it’s pretty painful to interact with businesses right now,” David Marcus, head of messaging products at Facebook, said in an interview. “We’re bringing back the conversational nature of commerce.”

In many respects, Facebook’s moves bring it closer to WeChat and Line. The two wildly popular Asia-based messaging platforms offer a range of other services, from virtual stickers for expressing moods to the ability to call a taxi or order takeout food.

“So much of their revenue is coming from other services they provide,” said Cathy Boyle, the senior analyst for mobile at eMarketer, a research firm.

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Screen shot showing the new Messenger platform from Facebook, which allows apps to integrate with Facebook Messenger so people can express themselves with GIFs, photos, videos, and audio clips.

That contrasts with the big American players in messaging, which besides Facebook include Apple with its iMessage, Google with Hangouts and Microsoft with Skype, which have done little to move beyond video conversations.

“All of these things are essentially free, and there’s no business model around them today,” said Jan Dawson, head of Jackdaw Research.

Mr. Dawson said that Messenger had the potential to evolve into a useful tool for businesses. “What Facebook Messenger could be is a platform that would allow you to start with chat and escalate to audio or video conversations. Someone already has their identity set up,” he said.

To do that, Facebook wants to entice developers to integrate their apps with the service.

Matt Serletic, chief executive of Zya, which rushed to finish its music app Ditty for a debut on stage as part of Wednesday’s announcements, said that Facebook made it easier for a small start-up like Zya to get an app off the ground. His team could focus on building its technology for converting text messages into songs, and simply plug in to Messenger’s technology for people to share the tunes.

“As a start-up developer, there is a lot of risk in whatever you do,” he said in an interview. “This shortens the time to actually get to scale and engage a large user base.”

After years of often testy relationships with developers and other corporate partners, Facebook has been trying to position itself as a more reliable friend of business.

At last year’s developer conference, it announced tools that enabled app makers to include Facebook ads to make money and to incorporate Facebook’s login system and other shortcuts to simplify their apps. The company claims that the ad product has grown rapidly, but it has declined to provide any revenue data, making it impossible to evaluate its success.

At this year’s conference, Facebook unveiled an upgrade of its LiveRail advertising platform that turns it into a full-fledged suite that can serve video, native or other mobile ads from Facebook or other ad networks directly into mobile apps. The company will also tap its deep knowledge of its users’ activities to give app developers detailed information about which demographic groups are engaging with the ads.

That competes with similar mobile ad offerings from Google, Yahoo and Twitter’s MoPub unit, all of which are trying to persuade developers to use their company’s advertising tools.

Like its competitors, Facebook is also trying to win over developers by offering them deeper analytical tools to understand who is using their products and where people get stuck. A shoe retailer, for example, wants to know where in the shopping flow people decide not to buy and leave the app.

“We’re building a way for accessing that data throughout the flow,” said Eddie O’Neil, platform product manager at Facebook.

Ultimately, winning over developers means more usage and more revenue for Facebook, although it could take years before the money coming in is meaningful. “This is the first inning of a very long journey,” Mr. Marcus said.